


the adventure that will end your life

by homsantoft (tofsla)



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gift Giving, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2016-07-19
Packaged: 2018-07-25 09:23:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7527256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/pseuds/homsantoft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zevran and Brosca fall in love without a template to follow. Two attempts at giving a gift.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the adventure that will end your life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [serenityfails](https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenityfails/gifts).



> Katie asked for something about Zevran & Brosca & the earring that Zevran offers in his romance. And here it is!

To love is death. Rinna slumps blank-eyed upon the wooden floorboards, blood sinking into them. Taliesen's body cools on the filthy steps of a Denerim back-alley.

They were unstoppable once.

Rinna kept watch, a gargoyle crouched on the roof of a fine country villa. Taliesen, picking locks to let him into the kitchen, the two of them talking quick and quiet to the servants. Fortunate that they did not love their master. He had no taste for killing bystanders.

Zevran, alone up the stairs. 

Are you the boy, then?

Why, certainly.

His smile was meant for seduction, and it served its purpose admirably; an easy thing, to persuade a man who had been expecting someone to fuck.

Oh, but he was beautiful. Beautiful when he slid his robe from his shoulders, his jeweled earring glittering in the lantern-light; beautiful when he bent, smiling, to kiss Zevran's neck. Zevran would have lain with him gladly, although by all accounts he was a quite impressively horrible man outside the bedroom. Well, why not take one's pleasure anyway, when the man was willing and the end was already determined? 

Had he been a little older, he would have done so.

It was nerves, perhaps, that brought his hidden blade to his hand in that moment.

The man was beautiful, also, in his shock. Oh, not in a sexual way; none of that for Zevran. But there was a sort of elegance to his death. A pretty thing, to take a life so cleanly.

Zevran's hands trembled when he lay the man back upon his bed. Trembled as he adjusted his own clothes.

It was on impulse that he took the ring. A chaste kiss pressed to a dead man's forehead. It is done. I am changed. Made whole.

Thank you.

From the roof, Rinna called like a night-bird, signalling time, and Zevran slid quietly from the window.

The three of them, later, laughing and drunk, running through the streets as dawn approached, celebrating. Falling into bed together. 

So it went.

And it was good, it was good. He thought it a fine piece of fun, until it came apart. And now he alone remained, and the others, stumbling between love and jealousy, were dead.

As reminders of danger go, Taliesen is a brutal one.

But it is done.

"Let's get out of here," Leif says. Hand on Zevran's elbow, only a quick touch, always mindful of the limits of their entanglement in a way that Zevran himself, Zevran who should know so much better, struggles to match. "Fucking mess."

I want to tell you everything, Zevran thinks. All of it, every secret part I have edged around even in my most confessional moods. I want to tell you how it was to kiss him, how it was to watch him bend his head between Rinna's beautiful legs. How it was when he fucked me, and Rinna kissed me as he did it, her mouth entirely unlike his, demanding where he was pliant. Held my head in her strong hands. I wonder which of us he was most jealous of. I was more jealous of him than of her, by far. 

But it was as it was.

It is as it is. 

There are eyes on them: Alistair curious, Wynne concerned. 

He swallows the urge. Swallows down what might very well be love, past or present, thick in his throat, threatening to turn his stomach. 

Thinks instead of tokens. An earring, taken with trembling fingers, which is worth more than anything else he owns. Treasured more than anything else he owns, except for two gifts, recently given.

 

 

"I'm not taking payment," Leif says. He runs his thumb over the precious stones, along the fine loop of gold on which they sit. He is watching it intently, as though it holds the key to some mystery. "You don't owe me, Zevran. I don't need money and I don't need you to give up something you treasure just because I've got your back. If it's a token—"

He shrugs.

In the afternoon light, his skin takes on a warm bronze tone. Lines around the corners of his eyes, as yet only fine. Where his hair has for most of the last year been pulled up into a loose knot that can be tucked away under a helmet, it sits now in elaborate braids, pinned up close against the back of his head. It is armour, newly acquired in the face of Ferelden nobility. Zevran knows it well.

He wants Leif so badly that it frightens him. Leif has never been less than kind to him, but never more than friendly—surely never more than that.

Words whispered in the dark against the back of Zevran's shoulder, hands tender on his hips—one may say such things without obligation. And yes, they are many things to each other.

But not this.

"I simply wish you to have it," Zevran says. "It would satisfy me, even if you do not require it. It has meant a lot to me, but so have—so has—"

Leif looks up at him sharply, and he regrets his correctly chosen word—regrets the understanding he can see dawning on Leif's broad features. 

"Zevran," he says gently, "I'll take it if it means something." A gesture, encompassing both of them without naming the thing itself, the whatever-it-is. "But if it isn't—you haven't got much."

Of course he would _know._ Lie with someone who is familiar with doing what one must and holding as little as possible. Sit with them in the dark exchanging quiet words of understanding. And, as payment for those moments of something like contentment, one must live with being understood.

"I certainly don't need your pity," he says. "You don't want the earring, you don't get the earring."

"Just think about it," Leif says. "Ask me again tomorrow, if you still want to give it."

"You are infuriating," Zevran says. "An impossible man!"

"I've been told," Leif says, and he says it levelly, but Zevran still feels a prick of guilt. Something twisting around the memory of Orzammar, of violent repression.

"Excuse me," he says.

He flees. Flees along the corridor of their accommodations to a room that is for his use but which he had not thought he would be inhabiting. 

Oh, yes, it is flight—what use is there pretending it to be anything but? How Leif confuses him, how Leif has always confused him, all his harshness and gentleness. Zevran becomes a panicked, uncertain thing; a wild animal started into frantic motion, and by what? An unexpected moment, the seriousness in Leif's expression when he rejected payment and everything it summoned into Zevran's mind.

To love is death. It is to leave oneself open.

Leif loved Leske, that Carta dwarf that Zevran only ever saw in battle—and oh, it's too alike, this. The one who got away kills the one who remains, not out of malice but because they can never, ever go back.

Leif, who breaks necks and slides blades neatly between ribs, wonderful and precise, faltered in the face of Leske's anger. It was Zevran's blade that claimed his life, clean across the throat. 

And Leif thanked him.

He did not really understand it, until today, with Taliesen before him.

 

 

It's night before Leif comes to him—did he need to calm down, or was he giving Zevran space? It is as well, regardless. Zevran has paced and cursed and very nearly thrown something expensive and breakable, and if he is still in deadlock with his own emotions, at least he has exhausted the worst of their intensity.

What is one to do with this?

"Want to talk?" Leif asks.

"Definitely not," Zevran says.

"And you _really_ don't want to fuck."

A glint of humour there, but one that Zevran can't really appreciate, not right now. "Have you nothing else in that head of yours?"

Leif shrugs, as though Zevran hadn't just snapped at him. "We can just sit if you like. Got to fix some of my stuff up after that last fight. Could spar later, if that's better."

Zevran shifts uneasily, drops himself onto the bed. "I—would not mind the company," he says, with greater truth than is comfortable.

So they sit. Leif on the floor, his gear spread out before him, daggers to one side. Tool rolls and pouches, filled with bottles for poison and healing—more of the former than the latter. Coils of wire for traps, lock-picks carefully ordered by size. A whetstone, and a length of leather to bind a loosened grip. Needle and thread for the frayed corner of a pouch.

It's soothing to watch him work, for a time, but the awareness of how much he wants Leif's presence even in these simple ways feeds back all too soon into anxiety.

Leif picks up a dagger and pulls the strip of leather to him, gets to work tugging the old binding free. 

Zevran's uneasiness grows, swells like the silence in the room, threatens to crush him.

"Do you know," Leif says, without looking up from his work, "I don't have a damn thing left from Orzammar?"

"I see," Zevran says.

"When I left, I'd just hauled myself out of a cell. You know that. Not much to bring along, really. Shitty rags. A broken chestpiece." He tests the feeling of the dagger in his hand, frowns, goes back to adjusting. "I had a few things back home. Tokens. Didn't have lovers, but I guess—people who cared a bit more. Who could've been something, if we were anywhere else."

"You loved this Leske of yours, I think," Zevran says.

Leif laughs, bitter. "Yeah, and he just wanted to fuck my sister. Romance." He tosses a dagger to Zevran, who plucks it delicately from the air; a little piece of showmanship between them like a secret joke. "Sharpen this, would you? Messed the blade up on one of your Crow friends' armour."

This he can do. A simple task.

"You should be more careful with your strikes in battle," he says. "You can be very precise against a single enemy—this is why you were so eager to learn my secret ways, I suspect. But against many…" He shrugs. "You are no better than I, and have a great deal more depending upon your efficacy."

"I used to punch people, mostly," Leif says, and it is almost as though they aren't both of them tumbled off balance by the day's events.

"And I used to kill people strictly on a single contract basis, without worrying about what their position vis-à-vis the end of the world might be."

"Oh, don't worry," Leif says. "I'm not trying to claim I miss the punching. Pay was shit and to be honest it didn't really feel much further from the end of the world than this. I'm just saying. But you're right, we'll have to do some more work as a group."

"Morrigan will be _delighted_ ," Zevran says.

"Morrigan will leap at the chance to hex Alistair in the confusion and you know it."

Zevran laughs. Sharpens Leif's blade with long deliberate strokes. The blade is indeed dulled along one edge, and notched near the tip.

How is one to order one's thoughts, if not even this sort of activity will suffice? If sex seems only like one more complication? Ludicrous—what complication has there ever been to sex? He's very good at it.

But if he thinks of lying with Leif now, it is an aching thing. Wanted, wanted, wanted—but feared, also.

Leif's rough hands would be careful on his skin. And he would say—oh, all those things that he says when they have sex. Things that might, possibly, be an offer.

Or only a game. He thinks Leif a better person than to toy with another, but it need not be a case of knowing deception. Sometimes two people are simply not reading from the same script—one never knows.

He is developing a headache.

Leif has laid aside all pretense of putting his tools in order. Watches him, measures him.

"I'll leave you in peace if you want, you know," he says.

Zevran glances away, back again; knows that he has revealed a part of himself in doing so. "I think, perhaps, that would be for the best," he says. "For tonight only."

 

 

Zevran turns the earring between his fingers. Considers it. No—considers Leif, rather. The way he touched it, the look on his face when he glanced up at Zevran.

Leif will take it if it means something. But what? What would it mean?

How terrible it is, to fumble for a safe path through an unknown mire.

He was never the mastermind of their plans, when they were Crows, three, balanced against one another. Alone, what is he to do?

It is wrong, all of it, wrong. Wrong that he is alone. Wrong that the company he wishes for is as it is. He killed for Taliesen and he tried to die for Rinna. What else is there?

Only more questions. And perhaps it doesn't matter, with the blight marching across the land.

Perhaps it matters more than ever.

For Leif, he would— 

What?

For Leif, he would do very nearly anything. But is that love?

 

 

He goes to Leif in the hour before dawn, and finds him awake, sitting by an open window, studying the streets below.

"Nightmares?" Zevran asks, closing the door behind him.

Leif turns to him, shrugs, one-shouldered. Of course there were nightmares. There always are.

"Thought I'd got myself out from beneath the sodding stone," Leif says. "Guess the Archdemon has other ideas."

Zevran reaches for him, a hand on the shoulder, brief as Leif's hand on his elbow the day before.

"Leif," he says. "Might we speak?"

"Always," Leif says. "Anything you like."

"I hardly know where to begin," Zevran says. "I apologise for last night. I suppose that will do. I acted like a child. This is simply—difficult for me."

Leif watches him in silence.

"You know what it is to live as an assassin—or something like it. Sentiment is dangerous. It may see you killed, or the person you care for killed. It may hinder your work. I did not think, when I offered to take you to bed—" He sighs. "What else would I have expected, between two people such as ourselves? And yet—"

"Zevran," Leif says, "are you saying you're in love with me?"

His heart seems to stutter in panic. He suspects, and still—still, he has recognised love only in moments of loss. How is he to know it, unbloodied, in a neatly furnished bedroom in Denerim? 

But here is the core of it: the idea of Leif dying shakes him deeply. The idea of their parting, inevitable as it feels, likewise.

And the world is ending, and this may be one of the last things he ever does, and he must dare. 

Fortunate that he has no distaste for gambling.

"I have the earring here," Zevran says. "Would you take it now? As a token. You should have something—you should know how much you matter to me. If you like. I have no idea how to do this."

"Neither do I," Leif says. "I guess at least neither of us will know when we fuck up."

His hands are warm around Zevran's, his fingers gentle as he picks the earring up. 

"I think," he says, "I'll enjoy wearing this."

"And I will enjoy seeing you wear it," Zevran says. How ludicrous that he should sound so hoarse in saying it. How ludicrous that he should be so fervently sincere in those words.

"Better?" Leif asks. Smiles, secret understanding.

"I will be," Zevran says, and stoops to kiss him.


End file.
